Re: Re: Perl Exam?

While I understand your perspective Tilly, my own experience in hiring programmers leads to me to believe that tests are *required*.

Too often, education and experience show a very small part of the picture. When giving simple tests, I've seen people with impressive resumes fall *way* short. To the point that I am truely frightened.

This is not true of just finding developers who know perl, but also Java (perhaps more so), C++, and even sysadmins.

The sad fact is that the majority of people currently employed doing technical work simply walk through work in a deep dark haze. They try this, that and the other thing, until it sort of works, not knowing why. They copy and crib (not that that's always bad) without understanding what they're copying (that's bad, IMO). I don't believe this is isolated to technical professions, it is true of here too.

You have to realize that most management types simply do not have the skills and knowledge base to make reasonable assessements of a programmers skill level. For those people, tests are the only way they can assess how well a person knows a given skill.

Should a perl interview test be hard? Of course not. It should stupid simple. The kind of test where if someone misses a few questions you have to seriouslly consider that they either a) lied or b) have brain damage. The kind of test you could pass by skimming an intro book to perl the day before the exam.

Sad fact is that I'll bet more than half of the people you interview won't pass such a stupid simple test. Such is life.

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Re: Re: Re: Perl Exam?
by tilly (Archbishop) on Oct 21, 2003 at 15:13 UTC

I'll bet that the failure rate is closer to 2/3 than 1/2.

Question 1 at (OT) Interview questions -- your response? is based on a conversation that Ovid and I had where I described an interview question that I actually use. (Ovid translated it into pseudocode, and omitted the statement that each array can be assumed to only have unique elements.) I generally ask that question in Perl, and stand ready to explain any language construct that the other person doesn't understand. I further walk them through a 3-part question, first is to describe what it does, second is to figure out the performance, and then third is to come up with an approach (code not required) to solve the scalability problem.

About 2/3 of people I have interviewed (all purportedly experienced programmers, etc, etc) fail that test. No halfway competent programmer of my experience (tested on friends, co-workers, etc) has found it hard. (Several have been puzzled about where the challenge is supposed to be.) Knowledge of Perl does not appear to make much of a difference, even though I give the question in Perl.

And here we come to what I consider a critical point. I think that Perl experience only really matters if you want someone to hit the ground running in a very Perl-specific environment. If you use a mix of languages, then while you might like Perl, you don't necessarily want to insist on it. Looking for that is somewhat harder.

Incidentally for perspective on why companies find hiring the right person so hard, read Anne Learns To Recruit. :-)

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